Looking for some software to help monitor the network for router/switch and server outages, and send email alerts when problems happen. If it could help show traffic patterns and potential nodes with excessive broadcasts that would be a bonus.

I would like to have a jump on the users discovering major issues (i.e. "Is the internet down?")

Re: Splunk - if you're looking for a "pure" or classic network / device monitoring setup, then Splunk may not be what you're looking for. But it certainly can be (and is) used that way - some customers have dumped Patrol, OV, nagios and other monitoring tools for splunk. As for difficulty with setup, yeah it varies, depending on what you want to monitor.

For those who have chosen Splunk, it comes down to being able to do more than monitoring.

I a big nagios fan, but at work we use opsview http://www.opsview.com/community. It is basically nagios with a great web ui (you can do almost everything from the ui), optional commercial support and nice stuff like mrtg, nagvis, nmis and replicated monitoring support included in their community edition out of the box.

They have packages for red hat, debian, ubuntu, solaris 10 and, of course, you can build it from sources if you want. They also have a virtual appliance (vmware) to get yourself started in no time.

All the nagios plugins you can write/download from the nagios exchange(s) sites you can use with opsview.

We have been using it for over one year now and are very satisfied with it.